Despite Carrie Fisher's tragic death over three years ago, General Leia still had a pivotal role to play in STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. By making use of footage filmed for STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, plus a little digital trickery, audiences got to see Leia on the big-screen one last time.
There is one moment in STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER which flashes back to events post-RETURN OF THE JEDI and finds Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) instructing Leia in the ways of the Force. While speaking with Yahoo Entertainment, ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Patrick Tubach said that while Hamill played Luke in the flashback and was digitally de-aged, they needed an actress to perform Leia's role. Director/co-writer J.J. Abrams elected to ask Billie Lourd, Carrie Fisher's daughter who also plays Lieutenant Connix in the sequel trilogy, to fill her mother's shoes.
Billie was playing her mother. It was a poignant thing, and something that nobody took lightly — that she was willing to stand in for her mom… It was an emotional thing for everybody to see her in that position. It felt great for us, too. If you’re going to have someone play [Fisher’s] part, it’s great that it’s [Billie] because there are a lot of similarities between them that we were able to draw from. The real challenge was just making the Leia footage we had to work with fit in that scene.
When it came to showing Leia's face in that flashback scene, they were able to use footage from RETURN OF THE JEDI, but there was very little they could make use of which meant that the scene had to be brief. "What you see is what we developed," said visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett. "The idea was to provide this great surprise where they take the helmets off, and you see Luke and Leia’s younger faces. We scoured outtakes from the original movies, and we took some pieces and then had to try and figure out the technical aspect of putting that shot together." For the rest of Leia's appearances in THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, Guyett explained that the VFX team created the "new" footage by using live-action elements of Carrie Fisher's face and building a digital body around it.
When you see her in this movie, it's the live-action element of her face taken from outtakes of either The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi, and then building a digital Carrie around that face. She's wearing a new costume, she's got new hair, she's got new jewelry. We didn't want it to feel like we'd simply taken previous shots from previous movies just edited her in; we wanted her to be unique to this movie, and we wanted her to be integrated into the scenes. J.J.’s principal in pre-production was, ‘I want Princess Leia to be played by Carrie Fisher. How do we do this?’ That was the integrity that he wanted brought to it, so that he could really put his hand on his heart and say that Princess Leia was always played by Carrie Fisher.
STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER is now playing in theaters, so be sure to check out a review from our own Matt Rooney and let us know what you thought of the film as well!